Enhancing Personal Informatics Through Social Sensemaking

Personal informatics practices are increasingly common, with a range of consumer technologies available to support, largely individual, interactions with data (e.g., performance measurement and activity/health monitoring). In this paper, we explore the concept of social sensemaking. In contrast to high-level statistics, we posit that social networking and reciprocal sharing of fine-grained self-tracker data can provide valuable context for individuals in making sense of their data. We present the design of an online platform called Citizense Makers (CM), which facilitates group sharing, annotating and discussion of self-tracker data. In a field trial of CM, we explore design issues around willingness to share data reciprocally; the importance of familiarity between individuals; and understandings of common activities in contextualising one's own data.